The evolution of F- in medieval documentation from Southern Ávila

Abstract

This study is dedicated to the representation of the former Latin F- in the medieval documentation from southern Ávila, in Spain. It is a very interesting area from a linguistic point of view, since we can find aspects of northern Castilian with characteristics of the southern varieties of Spanish. For our study we used a corpus composed of 75 original documents from the south of Ávila written throughout the fifteenth century. We analyze various examples of the use of h in replacements of f, both inside the word and, mainly, in the initial position. The data reveal that the phenomenon would be quite widespread in the region at the end of the Middle Ages.

Keywords

• fonética, grafemática, castellano medieval, dialectología